The team of “En guerre” following the screening on an exceptional Festival Day with the latest films by Lars Von Trier, the controversial Danish director, and Spike Lee, the Black icon of the 80s.
But above all, the emotion of Vincent Lindon and the non-professional actors of the film En guerre faced with a captivated audience. It was with enthusiasm that we joined in the long, very long standing ovation.
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, Lars Von Trier (Denmark), out of competition
USA, 1970s. We follow the dark serial killer Jack (Matt Dillon) over a period of 12 years. In fact, he confides in a mysterious interlocutor to whom he attempts to explain five of his particularly horrific murders as works of art.
Serial killer films are on the verge of becoming a genre in their own right. We were curious to see Lars Von Trier’s take, and we were not disappointed. With 61 murders, we are clearly in the high-end range. A failed architect, Jack explains that the murderer is misunderstood, a sort of cursed artist. In fact, his mysterious interlocutor (the magnificent Bruno Ganz) is not, as one might have thought, a psychiatrist, but the one who will lead the murderer into the underworld during an dreamlike and surprising final scene. In the images that haunt Jack, we find a jumble, including those of concentration camps and the final scene of his masterpiece Melancholia: perhaps a way to exorcise the year 2011 when this wonderful film was deprived of the Palme d’Or due to the director’s ramblings about Hitler during a press conference.
BLACKKKLANSMAN, Spike Lee (USA)
Ron Stallworth (the very promising John David Washington, the son of the other) is a Black officer from Colorado who managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan and almost becomes the leader of the local chapter.
It’s a less militant Spike Lee than in the past, addressing his favorite theme, racism in the USA. He does it with lightness and humor (some scenes are downright hilarious). However, the film is not superficial and brings to light these militant white supremacy movements like the KKK. Spike Lee heavily emphasizes the visceral anti-Semitism of these extremists. And while we do have a lot of fun, the laughter freezes during the final scene when we see last year’s news footage of an anti-racist activist being murdered by the KKK during a demonstration and this crime being justified by Donald Trump himself.
EN GUERRE, Stéphane Brizé (France)
Despite substantial financial sacrifices by the employees and a record profit for their company, Perrin company, a subsidiary of a German group, decides to completely shut down the site. The employees and their leader, Laurent Amédéo, will do everything they can to save their jobs.
Three years after The Measure of a Man, Stéphane Brizé persists and signs with his favorite actor Vincent Lindon and a new indictment of globalization. We experience the conflict from the perspective of the strikers as if we were participants. With realism and an astonishing mastery of group scenes, Stéphane Brizé delivers a very pessimistic message: no one can stop the forward march of globalization, neither the employees nor governments nor even company executives under the influence of their shareholders, the only beneficiaries of the operation, with, let’s say it, without beating around the bush, the workers in Romania where the factory will be relocated.
But isn’t it said that the most desperate songs are the most beautiful? Perhaps that’s what the audience wanted to convey to the film’s team by giving them the warmest welcome of the week.
